Listen to the testimony of Leah Garric kand Isaac Bitton who talk about two Jewish holidays: Sukkot, which celebrates the successful harvest and Purim, which commemorates the salvation of the Jewish people in the ancient Persian empire.
Leah Jacob Garrick was born on July 9, 1928 in Shanghai, China. Her grandparents had fled Iraq in the late 1800s and settled in Shanghai. She was raised in a Sephardic orthodox home and attended a British school. When she was nine years old, the Japanese started to bomb Shanghai, and she fled to Hong Kong with her mother, grandmother, and two siblings. Then they returned to Shanghai during the war, where her family tried to help as many refugees as they possibly could. Her father’s factory was touched by the bombing multiple times and they were constantly afraid of the air raids. She and her sister graduated from a Jewish school in 1944, and after the occupation of peoples’ homes by Japanese soldiers they were sent in 1947 to an orthodox school in Crown Heights, New York. Leah found a job at a Jewish organization, while her parents and brother fled from the communists in Shanghai in 1949 and went to Hong Kong. Her mother and brother moved to the US, while her father built another factory in Macau. Leah moved to San Francisco in 1955 and working for Jewish organizations there. Her interview was recorded in 2001, San Francisco, California.